100 books like Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom

It is a shame the author of this book died in the 9/11 World Trade Center terrorist attack because I always wanted to hear more from him. As with most of the books on this list, for me the details of what he did (did he enter with moving averages? How did he apply stochastics to his entry signals? Etc.) are not nearly as important as his mental state of mind. What did he feel like losing $1 million? How did he recover mentally? For me, being a good trader involves dealing with losses, and this book does a superb job of detailing how one trader did just that.

There are quite a few titles in the Market Wizards book collection, but my personal favorite is still the first of the series. In the book, Jack interviews different successful traders and investors. You’ll get to learn the basics of what they did (I personally know of one reader who started a successful hedge fund after reading one chapter of this book), but more importantly, you will be able to understand and explore the mindset of winning traders. Reading this book will help you mimic the behavior of some of the great traders of our time.

Of all the books about trading written over the decades, perhaps none is still so beloved, revered, and followed as this 1923 classic by journalist Edwin Lefèvre. Although technically a work of fiction, the book really is about the life and trading style of one of the greatest speculators of all time, Jesse Livermore (told under the guise of “Larry Livingston”).

What makes this book such a treasure is not just its fun prose, and interesting glimpse into what the process of investing in old exchanges and “bucket shops” was over a century ago, when ticker-tape and board boys with chalk and ladders were one’s only information about market prices, but also how the mind of one of the world’s greatest traders worked.

This book offers many gems of knowledge about trading—based upon the general principle that, although methods and technologies change, human nature does not and therefore “there is… show more.

This book explains every candlestick pattern you can think of, and more. The best part is that Bulkowski has tested each pattern and summarized the results. He puts the best patterns at the front of the book, so you do not need to read everything to find what you are really looking for. I use it as a reference quite often.

We all know we should save – and yet we don’t. Even the people living in the world’s richest nation – the USA – don’t save enough. Why? Plenty of research, plenty of anecdotes, and then some solid insights and recommendations by Ronal Wilcox make this book useful for individuals, employees, employers, and policymakers.  

I liked this book enough to write a blurb for it, as follows: “Any plan that would have led investors to Amazon, Apple, and Google is fine by me—and this one would have. Edward Ryan has created a systematic framework for owning what you know, a tried-and-true tactic.” No less a luminary than Peter Lynch endorses the idea, and in this book you’ll learn five steps to systematize it: list your life activities, extract stock ideas from them, rank those stocks, invest, and manage the portfolio. The second step is the most interesting to me; it’s where you consider which products and services in your life are most likely to keep a stock moving higher.

This is a slim, to-the-point, easily understood book based on the same principles as the well-known book on writing, The Elements of Style. With its five chapters, it is the opposite of the highly complex, bewildering, we-know-more-than-you communication put out on a daily basis by the investment industry. Its wisdom is timeless. It’s all that a first-time investor needs to know.

I liked reading Jane Bryant Quinn’s book as a young adult because it was comprehensive, and it seemed that she didn’t have a bias or axe to grind. Some of the popular financial writers at the time were pitching products in which they had a vested financial interest, which made a strong negative impression on me. 

This is an entirely different kind of book to those listed above. From 1990 to 1996 Amy Dacyczyn, a self-styled "frugal zealot," put out a monthly newsletter, The Tightwad Gazette. It contained all sorts of tips, tricks, strategies, and advice on how to pinch pennies. This book brings all her articles together in a single volume. For anyone committed to living simply–which usually means living cheaply–it is a goldmine. True, not all her recommendations met with my family's approval: mixing real maple syrup 50-50 with fake maple syrup received multiple thumbs down. But browsing through it is great fun, and on almost any page you'll find a salutary reminder of how you could be more frugal. And as we all know, frugality is associated with wisdom and with happiness.

The number one fear for women in divorce tends to be money, since a woman’s standard of living often falls significantly post-divorce. Barbara Stanny, a journalist and the daughter of H&R Block founder Richard Bloch, found herself in financial straits after her then-husband gambled away their money, left her with a massive tax bill, and fled the country. She had to learn to make and manage her own money to support her three children and has since become a financial educator. This book is critical for any woman who is worried about her finances in divorce. Stanny tackles both financial literacy and the psychology of money in this powerful and practical read.